Posted on 04/30/2016 11:56:20 AM PDT by Lorianne
Given that “redneck” and “hillbilly” remain the last acceptable stereotypes among polite society, it isn’t surprising that the stereotypical urban home of poor, recently rural whites remains an object of scorn. The mere mention of a trailer park conjures images of criminals in wifebeaters, moldy mattresses thrown awry, and Confederate flags. As with most social phenomena, there is a much more interesting reality behind this crass cliché. Trailer parks remain one of the last forms of housing in US cities provided by the market explicitly for low-income residents. Better still, they offer a working example of traditional urban design elements and private governance.
Any discussion of trailer parks should start with the fact that most forms of low-income housing have been criminalized in nearly every major US city. Beginning in the 1920s, urban policymakers and planners started banning what they deemed as low-quality housing, including boarding houses, residential hotels, and low-quality apartments. Meanwhile, on the outer edges of many cities, urban policymakers undertook a policy of “mass eviction and demolition” of low-quality housing. Policymakers established bans on suburban shantytowns and self-built housing. In knocking out the bottom rung of urbanization, this ended the natural “filtering up” of cities as they expanded outward, replaced as we now know by static subdivisions of middle-class, single-family houses. The Housing Act of 1937 formalized this war on “slums” at the federal level and by the 1960s much of the emergent low-income urbanism in and around many U.S. cities was eliminated.
In light of the United States’ century-long war on low-income housing, it’s something of a miracle that trailer parks survive. With an aftermarket trailer, trailer payments and park rent combined average around the remarkably low rents of $300 to $500. Even the typical new manufactured home, with combined trailer payments and park rent, costs around $700 to $1,000 a month. Both options offer a decent standard of living at far less than rents for apartments of comparable size in many cities. The savings with manufactured housing are a big part of the story: where the average manufactured house costs $64,000, the average site-built single-family house now costs $324,000. The savings don’t come out of shoddy construction either: manufactured homes are increasingly energy efficient, and their manufacturing process produces less waste than traditional site-built construction. With prosperous cities increasingly turning into playgrounds of the rich due to onerous housing supply restrictions, we shouldn’t take these startlingly affordable rents lightly.
>snip<
This is part of a movement to convince people that the American Dream is dead, and to get them to accept ever lower standards of living. Now they’re pushing trailers, soon I imagine we’ll be treated to articles about the joys of tent cities and a “back to nature” (open latrines) lifestyle.
Biggest problem with mobile homes is their susceptibility to natural disasters.
But cant blame people for wanting their own place.
Maybe if there was a way to secure manufactured housing to a crawl space then allow some form of conveyable title for the dwelling while leaving the land in the name of the landlord.
read
Just don’t build them in the path of a tornado. :-)
The latest push on HGTV is “Tiny Houses.”
Our betters want us to take up less space on their earth.
Tiny House Hunters
http://www.hgtv.com/shows/tiny-house-hunters
Yes “tiny houses” are hot, hot, hot right now.
Never mind that they are just homeier looking RVs.
LOL, I know right?
I think the point of the article is that trailer parks are a free market solution to providing homes for lower income people that actually works a lot better than government provided low income housing. If it were allowed in more places we’d go a lot further toward combatting homelessness etc than anything else that government could do.
Manufactured housing doesn’t have to be ugly, some of the newer modulars are nice-looking and difficult to distinguish from site-built, but the more modules there are, the higher the cost. Still less expensive than comparable though.
Yes, I agree I have seen some very attractive manufactured homes ... as well as generally agreeable looking.
Still, the vast majority of them are butt ugly (and they didn’t have to be). It’s a shame really. I hope that is turning around and the reverse will be true, more of them will be attractive than not.
I cant imagine that anyone who moves into o e of those would stay very lo g. Less than a year on average i bet
Yes, that was the main point of the article. Also that other forms of less expensive housing have been basically outlawed.
The bottom one looks like my housing build outs in fallout 4
Is that a Bridge-to-Nowhere?
A friend of mine lives in a really nice double-wide on his own land. Before the trailer was placed, he built a tornado shelter, then placed the trailer over it making sure the kitchen was directly over the entrance. Ye then cut a hole in the floor as an entrance to the shelter with steps leading down. He keeps all his valuables there. In the unlikely event they got broken into, he placed a rather large throw rug over the hinged door that led to the shelter. Hard to see and find.
It’s skirted like the homes should be, so the entrance isn’t visible from outside the trailer.
He’s never had to use it, but, there’s always that first time.
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